The Hyperledger project

Hyperledger is a project dedicated to building technologies to build permissioned DApps. Hyperledger fabric (or simply fabric) is an implementation of the Hyperledger project. Other implementations include Intel Sawtooth and R3 Corda.

Fabric is a permissioned decentralized platform that allows us to run permissioned DApps (called chaincodes) on top of it. We need to deploy our own instance of fabric and then deploy our permissioned DApps on top of it. Every node in the network runs an instance of fabric. Fabric is a plug-and-play system where you can easily plug and play various consensus protocols and features.

Hyperledger uses the blockchain data structure. Hyperledger-based blockchains can currently choose to have no consensus protocols (that is, the NoOps protocol) or else use the PBFT (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) consensus protocol. It has a special node called certificate authority, which controls who can join the network and what they can do.